Rick Meints

As per what you say above, we have tried to provide some "estimates" for when a book will be for sale, but we ended up being wrong. Thus, we really don't like to give them, as it leads to frustration and disappointment. The largest problems we have faced recently have been getting a book shipped to all of our warehouses so we can sell it everywhere at the same time. If we don't do that, we inevitably get complaints/grief from the customers who buy via warehouse X. Going forward, we are going to be announcing a book being for sale once it is in all our warehouses. You won't be seeing "Coming in future month X" sorts of announcements. Pe-orders have been suggested, but our system/website isn't currently able to handle them, thus no pre-orders. I expect all of the books you mention above will be available soon, but that's all I can say at this time.

The Pendragon Coe rulebook will be for sale at Chaosium Con.

We sell a day badge for Saturday. The freeform area is not sealed off behind locked doors so people could politely and unobtrusively have a look at what is going on. You shouldn't interact with any of the players, or distract them from what they are trying to do, of course, but being a fly on an out of the way wall for a few mins shouldn't be a problem. Check in with the admins running the game for what they think will be ok. For the RQ game sessions, the same above basically applies. Just ask the GM and players if it's ok.

Can we see a sample page or two?

So what do people think of the book?

Until the book is reprinted, there is only the first printing available in hardcopy. When we reprint is based on how quickly we sell through the first printing.

I believe I can help provide some info on some of this.

This is not legal advice. In general, using someone's Intellectual Property without a specific license/permission isn't going to be allowed on this site. It does not matter if your efforts are "for free" or not intended as commercial use. Fair use, in general, is meant for reviews, critiques, and parody. Fair use isn't broad. For example, using someone else's IP in a free game is not fair use. In the end, you are potentially denying the IP holder of current or future revenue. We remove certain materials from this site because we do not want to potentially be liable for someone's misuse or unauthorized use of someone else's IP.

I suggest that you allow the PC to pick the skills they want to improve via previous experience. After all, they get to decide how they spent their time back then. When in doubt, use the higher number. If that doesn't work, just add 10%. 🙂

We posted a Kickstarter Update last week.

We haven't decided on creating an "updated Red Book" yet. One big precursor to doing that would be having the first printing sell out so we would need to print more. A likely first step would be for us to create a 1-2 page PDF "addendum" for the RBoM and make that PDF available for free on our website.

It really depends on what your needs and interests are. If you are playing RuneQuest, especially as the Gamemaster, you would probably want to get Lightbringers and Earth Goddesses so you have full cult write-ups to use in play and for character creation. That might be less true if you are not playing in Dragon Pass or Prax (central Genertela). If you are newer to Glorantha and mainly just reading the books for enjoyment, the Mythology book provides a great overview of how religions/cults/magic all works in Glorantha. The Prosopaedia is a collection of brief summaries of all of the main deities/spirits/etc. in Glorantha. It could help point you to specific cults books you might want to read in further depth in the future. These two books aren't technically needed for use during play at the table, although the info can certainly help new players understand things.

To paraphrase one of my favorite movie quotes, Delecti has a long tradition of existence. Having him defeated, destroyed, and gone for good would be a tremendous loss for MGF. He has a lot of choices and his future is largely undecided.

Very probably no slipcase, just individual books.

Call of Cthulhu Classic makes it very clear that it is not for 7th edition (it's actually 2nd edition). We have yet to find anyone who was/is confused by it not being the latest edition of the game. The Miskatonic Repository is a very different situation. We don't want anyone to get confused about what edition a product is for. They are all for the current edition. We used to sell some of the previous editions of the CoC rules on DTRPG, but the sales were quite low, and the confusion caused by it made it not worth continuing. The Jonstown Compendium is also a very different situation. The RQ Classics don't really require any conversion to use, and we also have had little to no confusion raised by the buying public. While we don't like leaving a significant amount of money on the table (that's why we reprinted Beyond the Mountains of Madness) we are not going to deal with the grief and confusion raised by selling a product that might sell 10 copies per year. As we have said for some time, all of the monograph copyrights reverted back to their authors/creatives. If the Monograph is for CoC they are welcome to update it to 7th ed. and then publish it on the Miskatonic Repository. If they did so they would probably make more money as MR books than they ever did as Monographs. As for why the authors haven't done that, you'd have to ask them. Updating a CoC monograph to 7th edition could take very little time. Most monographs are not super stat heavy. Chances are the electronic file would need to get updated/adjusted for DTRPGs PDF standard and sizes in many cases, and the other 7th edition changes required could be done at the same time.

Chaosium licensed the production of the hardcover RQ2 rulebook to Reston Publishing in the early 1980s. Reston did one print run of the book, with dust jacket. It never had a rune on the cover (below left). The gold colored embossed RuneQuest logo with the author names below it is all that was on the cover. The Kickstarter hardcover leatherette (below, right) has a lot more gold foil on the cover, as we did a version of all the cover art. It is a bit more overwhelming to look at. On a slightly related note, one thing I am wondering is if Reston used two different materials for the book cover. The cover made of Leatherette material is all I have in my collection, but I could have sworn that around 20-25 years ago I saw the book with the cover made of a slightly lighter shade of red cloth. I wonder if they possibly did the cloth material version for libraries... I've never seen one since, and my memory isn't 100% on seeing a cloth bound version. I keep looking.

Yes, when we reprint a book we try to include as many corrections as possible. Two examples of this are the RQ Core RB and the Glorantha Sourcebook. We haven't needed to reprint most of the RQ books we have published thus far.

Questworlds hasn't died. There have been a number of delays though.

The Sartar, Dragon Pass, and GM Guide books are all pretty far along, although none are in layout yet.

They were printed between 1999 and 2005, and by different printers. Trimming is not a precise science, so a millimeter or so in height difference should be expected. The copies on my shelf are very close in height, but also vary slightly. I doubt that yours are POD knock-offs, which are pretty rare. If they are, they probably have a glossy cover instead of a matte cover, which has far less shine to it.

PM me if you wish to purchase Ye Book of Tentacles 3-6. I have a number of them. Postage would be from the US.

All of the Avalon Hill RuneQuest 3 line of products, including Sun County, went out of print when AH was bought by Hasbro. Basically, it hasn't been for sale since 2000.

While I am happy to see you all discuss which products you want reprinted, please understand that we already pretty much have that figured out. I include the above snippet of Andre's list because those are definitely on our "want to reprint" list (please don't ask for the status).

People who want to assist the Nostalgia department are welcome to email me at rick-at-chaosium-dot-com. Please note that the main tasks are scanning, OCRing, cleaning up art in photoshop and doing layout in InDesign. Access to the original material is also required as we don't have spare paper copies of the originals to ship to people. Add all that up and that is why we get few volunteers. NOTE: Such volunteers would be helping Chaosium produce these as Chaosium products. We are not interested in licensing this out.

As the head of Chaosium's Nostalgia Department, I feel best placed to restate the status of these sorts of things. We own all of the rights to the RQ3 material. There is only one hindrance to getting any of that material released: Time. Yes, nobody likes that answer, but that does not make it any less true. We have all our staff, except a small part of my time, focused on new product releases. While we could hire additional staff to work on these "classic reprint" projects, that just guarantees we would make less money on them when many of them are only marginally profitable. We usually only sell a few hundred of these sorts of RQ books, btw. That's PDF and POD sales. It's hard to be profitable.